If I were running IndieHosters I’d love to hear from my users about how everything works out for them, and if there’s something that needs improvement. So let me give a first overall feedback to how things have worked for me so far.
I should point out that most of the issues are likely not related to IndieHosters themselves, but to Nextcloud, or to lacking support from third party apps. But I think it’s still good to know.

cloud

The main reason I decided to give IndieHosters a try was because of Nextcloud. I have been going through a series of services – also paying for them – but either they have some shady privacy practices, the software is not working as I’d like it, or there was some other issues. Nextcloud seemed to be checking a lot of boxes for me.
My experience has, unfortunately, been a bit of a mixed bag so far. I do like the features and usability of the web app, Android app and desktop client, but the latter keeps crashing on me. There’s a bug somewhere, which I have reported several times, but so far I’m still stuck with it.
Another issue I have observed, which I didn’t have with any other cloud service so far, is that Nextcloud sometimes needlessly identifies two files as conflicting. So one has always to check for that when syncing.
These two things aren’t huge deal-breakers… but they are annoying.
Once in a while (not very often) the whole thing is down (504 Gateway Time-out error), and the desktop client refuses my password and won’t connect.

tasks

This is another feature I was very interested in, but unfortunately there’s too many deal breakers.
Apparently either Nextcloud has a weird CalDAV implementation, or MacOS / iOS is very picky (the latter seems more likely). Fact is, I wasn’t able to properly sync tasks with anything but my Android phone. It just won’t work with either iOS (some versions work, others don’t) and MacOS (I’ve only tried Yosemite).
The other issue is that – so far – I wasn’t able to find a decent todo app for Android that would work with CalDAV sync and work the way I want.

email

I was looking for a new email address to replace gmail and getting a package with cloud and email seemed really perfect. Again, it’s not been much of a smooth ride. When sending emails from indie.host to gmail, they often end up straight in the receivers spam folder. Unfortunately gmail is still the most common mail people have.
The webmail client is not very usable in my opinion, the UI is very confusing. But I don’t really need it, IMAP works fine for me.
Btw. you forgot to renew your certificate for the mail server. At least, my email client says it’s expired.

news

This one actually works really well! I’m using it daily and it works nicely!

Thanks for the feedback, indeed we do value those a lot as we are not always aware of everything.

kurodama:

My experience has, unfortunately, been a bit of a mixed bag so far. I do like the features and usability of the web app, Android app and desktop client, but the latter keeps crashing on me. There’s a bug somewhere, which I have reported several times, but so far I’m still stuck with it.

We should investigate more on this issue to identity the source of this bug. Maybe it is related to our current configuration (see below) which will be fixed or to nextcloud which is out of our scope.

kurodama:

tasks
This is another feature I was very interested in, but unfortunately there’s too many deal breakers.

Apparently either Nextcloud has a weird CalDAV implementation, or MacOS / iOS is very picky (the latter seems more likely). Fact is, I wasn’t able to properly sync tasks with anything but my Android phone. It just won’t work with either iOS (some versions work, others don’t) and MacOS (I’ve only tried Yosemite).

The other issue is that – so far – I wasn’t able to find a decent todo app for Android that would work with CalDAV sync and work the way I want.

This one we are aware of it. We have some issues with our current configuration. We will soon fix it. We are currently migrating our services to our new infrastructure based on kubernetes. We wanted to fix that during the migration but as it takes longer that expected I will change our configuration before the migration. It will fix the CalDav issue. Will it fix the 504 Gateway Time-out error? Maybe…

kurodama:

email
I was looking for a new email address to replace gmail and getting a package with cloud and email seemed really perfect. Again, it’s not been much of a smooth ride. When sending emails from indie.host to gmail, they often end up straight in the receivers spam folder. Unfortunately gmail is still the most common mail people have.

We did had some issues in the past with some mail providers that considered us as spammers. Why I still don’t know and unfortunately it is hard to get precise answers from some of those “big” providers. I did not know about gmail tagging emails coming from mail.indie.host as spam though. That seems to be new… We will investigate on this… I guess we were a bit of a victim of our success at one point and hopefully with time we will be considered as a serious email providers. It is a tricky process. As you can see here: https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=mx%3Amail.indie.host&run=toolpage# indicators are green so why some of the emails end up as spam is kind of a mystery…

We fixed it this morning. The certificate did not get renewed as it was supposed to. Sorry about that.

kurodama:

The webmail client is not very usable in my opinion, the UI is very confusing.

I have to say that I agree on this one, the webmail app is young and maybe not mature enough yet. That is why we decided to set up a rainloop instance, https://rainloop.indie.host (still need a bit of work to open it to all of our users, I will work on it next week)

I will let you know when I fix our configuration so you can evaluate if it is better.

Yes, I had checked that as well, and indeed, looks all green!
The issue does not happen with all gmail accounds, I had the problem with 2 so far, but I haven’t sent too many emails yet, so I need to collect some more data.
The only thing I can say for sure is that so far it only happened with gmail.

unteem:

I have to say that I agree on this one, the webmail app is young and maybe not mature enough yet. That is why we decided to set up a rainloop instance, https://rainloop.indie.host (still need a bit of work to open it to all of our users, I will work on it next week)

I will let you know when I fix our configuration so you can evaluate if it is better.

Yeah Rainloop seems much better! Having a webmail access is always good as a fallback solution in some cases!
Thanks again!